iMindShift with Steve Chandler

Somewhere in the middle of nowhere someone set me free

My new book, Creator, has just been released and in the back Recommendations section it tells you to come here to this blog site if you want to listen to two of the songs mentioned in the book.

“The Middle of Nowhere” was written by Fred Knipe and myself back in our music business days when we did songwriting and music publishing for a living. “In Your Right Mind” was written by Fred a few years later after a long conversation we'd had about how natural creativity is for children and how it gets disconnected later in life when social anxieties take over a grown-up's life.

“The Middle of Nowhere”:

Middle of Nowhere

 

“In Your Right Mind”:

In Your Right Mind

 

I hope you enjoy this music.

 

And here's a little piece of Creator:

For many years my job was songwriter. I co-wrote songs with my brilliant collaborator Fred Knipe. One of my favorite songs we wrote was called “The Middle of Nowhere.” One line was, “Out there in the middle of nowhere, someone set me free.”

Normally the idea of being “in the middle of nowhere” is not so good. But something about that phrase was haunting. And it’s funny what happens when you take a second look at a phrase like that. Even funnier when you put music to it. It changes. What seems bleak and hopeless changes into something else.

Just like a person’s life when you add the awareness of eternal creativity to it. It’s like putting music to words that never would have been heard.

Writing that song got a small premonition of insight started in me back then. The insight that opens more every time I hear my recording of Fred singing it. What I now see is that there’s freedom in the middle of nowhere.

In my mind, the middle of nowhere is where creativity seems to live when we don’t know we have it. It’s as if we’re in the eye of the storm, in the middle of a hurricane of creative energy. It’s where I drop my preconceived thoughts and beliefs about who I am. Or even what I should do next.

From here, I can open to the source of spirit as taught by Dr. Ron Hulnick in his courses on spiritual psychology. He often invited his students to be willing to enter and stay awhile in “the divine unknowing,” a place the ego always wants to avoid, but a place where you will feel your true creative power.

What Kind of Fool Am I?

Last year at the Reinventing Yourself Weekend I was happy one of the evenings to go up in front of the room and sing some songs. I'm not a professional singer but I love to sing especially when it borders on being "entertaining."

I can make a fool of myself quite easily. In fact, one of the songs I'm going to sing this weekend at the Weekend is a medley people like called "Serial Fool" ... a mix of songs that all sing about being a fool.

Reinventing Yourself Weekend tends to bring that out in everyone...that impulse to be okay with being foolish and imperfect. So I am urging you to come experience the Weekend this year: find more info here: Reinventing Yourself Weekend 2017

Also my new book will come out that weekend and will be given to all of you. It's called Right Now, and here's a little preview from it...speaking of being okay with being perceived as a fool:

Not long ago I listened to a webinar wherein one of my favorite authors and teachers Dr. George Pransky talked about his early days of going into organizations to teach them his psychological principles that led to greater performance, productivity and morale.

There were many times when he was at a loss for what to say to his audience. Learning about the nature of thought and about the importance of their employees’ state of mind seemed off-subject. The group wasn’t getting how his teaching related to performance and their team’s productivity. Telling the story, Pransky laughed and said, “We were in over our heads!” But that didn’t stop him. He hung in there until they got it. They needed those breakthroughs right now. They didn’t have the luxury of waiting until he was fully prepared to connect with them.

He also didn’t see anything wrong with being in over his head. The opportunity to make a difference was right now, not in some overly-prepared, guaranteed-outcome future. (That future we’re all looking for.)

My friend Fred Knipe who is a genius songwriter and a wildly entertaining comedian created a comic persona named Dr. Ludiker. The humor of Ludiker is in how unqualified (and unprepared) he is to give advice. Yet he gives it freely and buoyantly even though the advice is all bizarre and hilariously incorrect. Audiences love this character. I think they are almost shocked at his character’s childish arrogance in delivering wisdom based on nothing. They love someone being that unprepared and still pressing on with wild unjustified confidence. Always in over his head! They laugh long into the night when Fred performs. His act is in great demand.

Dr. Ludiker is like the Charles Dickens character Pickwick, who, in the words of G.K. Chesterton, “… goes through life with that godlike gullibility which is the key to all adventures.  The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything.  It is he that gets the most out of life….  His soul will never starve for exploits or excitements who is wise enough to be made a fool of.”

AGAIN:  Reinventing Yourself Weekend 2017    SEE YOU THERE!

 

 

Let’s Give Everyone a Fresh Chance

Sometimes I like to assign movies for my clients to watch. One of them is Finding Dory. The little fish character voiced by Ellen DeGeneres has short term memory loss and much of the humor comes from her forgetting who the other characters are.

Hi, I'm Dory!

She might have a long scene with a character and see the same character two minutes later and have no idea who she’s talking to. Then cheerfully she says, “Oh hello! My name is Dory!” How exciting to find a new relationship! And for Dory, they’re all showing up as new.

What if I can try being Dory? When I arrive at a gathering and I see someone there who I have had judgmental thoughts about, this time I approach them as Dory. I am happy and cheerful. I am open and empty and so glad to run into them. There is no story about them that I have to filter their words through.

When I show up empty, I am right here right now in the present moment. Like falling out of thought and like falling in love.  Because only in the here and now can I fall in love, because falling in love is an experience of pleasant surprise, or, as G.K. Chesterton said about his spiritual awakening, it’s like receiving “absurd good news.”

And I can fall in love with anything. I recently learned to fall in love with taking the garbage out. I noticed that I dreaded it every week, and when it came time to do it I slogged through it as a means to an end. It never occurred to me that I could make it an end in itself.

So I slowed it down and treated it like a sacred Zen practice. It wasn’t long before I couldn’t wait until garbage day. I’d even say to Kathy in a voice that sounded like elation, “Tomorrow’s a big day.”

“Oh really? Why?”

“Tomorrow is garbage day!” 

She began to worry about me.  She started looking online for what she could find about the first stages of dementia.

Stories (elaborate webs of thought) make it hard for me to give something (like taking the garbage out) or someone (who had said something critical) a second chance. Someone criticizes me and I’m caught up into thinking they’ve done something deliberately hurtful. I try my best to forgive them, but built into the idea of forgiveness is the conviction that I am the person who was right and they are the person who was wrong. When I forgive them it feels like it’s big of me to do that! And that from now on they’ll never be on the same moral or ethical level as I am. It is from a superior level that I throw my pennies of forgiveness down to them. A magnificent being generously tossing coins into a human gene pool of inferiority.

Dory would be kinder than that. Dory wouldn’t remember what that other person had done or said.

In my experience of recovery from alcohol and drugs I have noticed that some people (who knew me when) never quite trusted or understood that my whole life had changed. I was “that drunk” to them every time they saw me, no matter that decades of sobriety had passed. I have friends and acquaintances in recovery who are never given a second chance by certain family members because the old stories are stronger than their capacity to forget.

I don’t actually regret any of that. It shows me the power of a story. It shows me that stories can prevent a relationship from ever really happening. They can become stories about what men are like. They can be stories about what women really want. These kinds of stories can hypnotize almost everyone alive today.

When I have a story about your political party, or your country, or your profession, who you really are doesn’t stand a chance. Whole countries have stories about other countries and will fight to the death to live out the story.

My clients enjoy Finding Dory. They see the love behind giving someone a new start.  Maybe the saying “Forgive and forget” can be shortened, in the interest of time management, to simply “Forget.” If you did that it would give the people in your world a fresh chance.

BEWARE of the MAKE-WRONG MACHINES

My path to recovery was definitely 12-Step. And I know that will anger a lot of people (because it already has) who think such a path is wrong and antiquated.

Books I enjoy and respect about addiction, like Amy Johnson's The Little Book of Big Change, advocate for Jack Trimpey's Rational Recovery which is a marvelous and effective approach except for one thing. It feels it has to make 12-Step wrong for RR itself to be credible and right.

Joseph Bailey's The Serenity Principle does the same thing. It creates a ridiculous caricature of AA and 12-Step in order to make itself seem more sensible and enlightened.

This attempt to create superior competing systems is not as helpful to the still-suffering alcoholic or addict as the authors may think. Trimpey's books are dripping with scorn and sarcasm about 12-Step programs that have saved my life and the lives of so many of my dearest friends and family members.

Religions do this too. Mormons say they have the only truth about spirituality. If I am happy and feeling spiritual and loving God in my Catholic way, well, I am just wrong and deluded and pathetic. I am to be pitied. My happiness is inauthentic. I'm not really happy. I couldn't be.  

Catholics say the same about Mormons. LDS is just flat out wrong and we, ourselves, are the only true lineage from the disciples to you! Trying to trademark God. Patent pending.

I've written about this dark alley in my previous books. The need to make others wrong in order to bolster my own feelings about being right. Soon I become a vicious, snarling, snarky make-wrong machine. I ridicule those who don't agree with me. I become more and more distant from them. Now I am an island. A human speck of disconnect.

But right! Oh, I am so right. So right I can barely stand it.

There is lucidity and hope and magic in the books by Trimpey and Bailey, which is why I am listing them in the back of this book as recommended reading.

But I also offer this important heads-up: what they say about AA and other voluntary, non-profit 12-Step programs (that cost you nothing to attend) bears no resemblance whatsoever to my 30-some years of experience attending those meetings. All the things they imply that AA "makes you" do and believe about God and yourself are just a total misreading of what really happens.

I am for anything that gets you clean and sober and gives you a second chance at life. Anything. There is no right or wrong where that is concerned.  

Like the song in West Side Story says, "When love comes so strong. . .there is no right or wrong. . .your love is your love."

Are you ready to make a BIG CHANGE?

Psychologist/Life coach Dr. Amy Johnson has written a very insightful little book about how we can find relief and, finally, total freedom from the habits that imprison us. Including the more desperate habits of drugs and alcohol.

In her book, The Little Book of Big Change, she correctly identifies urges, cravings and compulsions as mere thoughts. They are thoughts that we dramatize. When we call a passing thought a "craving" because of the sense of urgency it makes us feel, we think we need to do something fast about that uncomfortable feeling. So we act on the thought, the feeling  is relieved, and a neuronal pathway is formed. So the next time that thought reaches consciousness, and the uncomfortable feeling arises from it, we habitually act. We reach for a pill, or a smoke, or a wine bottle, or a doughnut. Or two.

In the brain there is now a vicious circle.

But what feels like an unbearable compulsion began as only a thought. If we believe and then dramatize the thought, the path to freedom and serenity is blocked.  And that path is everything.

"Compulsions obstruct the path by monopolizing consciousness," says Buddhist scholar Stephen Batchelor in Living with the Devil. "The hypnotic fascination they exert prevents us from attending to anything else. We behave like a rabbit dazzled by the headlights of a car."

Like rabbits, we are run over. Our death wish (compulsion for release) morphs us into road kill.  

We long to die to this discomfort. To not feel it.

What can we do about these thoughts that get internally dramatized in this way?

Stephen Batchelor says "To escape their grip does not entail suppressing them but creating a space in which we are freed to let them go and they are freed to disappear."

His recommended form of creating that space is meditation. But what if it were easier than that? What if we already knew about that space. . .that it was pre-existing inside of us? What if we were (already) that space? The space that the thought had shown up in? And if we just relaxed a bit, and grew still, the thought would continue on out of its own volition?  What if?

"As soon as I know the mind is distorted," says Shantideva, "I should remain as steady as a log."  

 

As the years went by I lost everything

   As I was growing up from newborn to two years old to four to six to ten, the feeling of personal warmth and security was leaving me.

I was becoming an individual.

Psychologists call this individuation. It became extreme at age 18 and I took my first drink. (I know young people often experiment with drinking and drugs at earlier ages now, but I was old school.)

My belief today is weird: I believe that if you can understand how to recover from addiction into what 12-step people call “good sobriety” (a very low risk for drinking or drugging again) you can understand how to enjoy life, even if you are not an addict.

I came upon this belief after noticing that my own recovery, after years of meetings and endless hours being mentored by my sponsor, had a major transference into my created profession of life coaching. Spiritual progress applied to everything.

The spiraling up beyond individuation is what I mean by spiritual progress. (Others might mean other things.) When the vicious circle you are in becomes a spiral, you are trucking. The creative genius Vladimir Nabokov said “a spiral is a spiritualized circle.” And personal growth is a matter of liberating the vicious circle, so one can spiral up.

What is that vicious circle? It is the mistake of taking the game of life too seriously, taking the behavior of others personally and circling around and around between worry and resentment.

Babies don’t do that.

There is an oceanic sense one has as a baby. Like feeling that you are a wave in a huge, thriving, pulsating ocean of life. No name, no separation, no individuation yet.

No separation means I cry and you come feed me. The two things are as connected as my hand and my fingers. I cry, you come change me. I don’t know yet that there’s any real difference between you and me, or between me and anything else. I don’t yet feel the disconnect. It’s awfully warm and secure on this fine planet!

Like a wave upon the ocean. The wave doesn’t know it’s a separate wave, or a good wave for surfing, or a bad wave. It feels like it’s just an expression of the ocean. Which it is! A gesticulation! It is only we, we labelers, who call it a wave. And by labeling it, we make it separate. We try to separate it from the ocean, not seeing it's just an expression, just a wave, like I am waving to you right now.

But trying to take the wave from the ocean and putting it in a sand castle on the shore?

You can see what happens to it.

So as a baby I was the ocean itself until I grew older and my parents kept insisting that I was a wave. And not only a wave, but a unique individual wave like no other. A wave with a name. The name was so important. It made my separation final and “the truth” about my life.

My first drink took me back to the ocean.

Back home.

Like the drunken character played by Robert Shaw sings in the movie Jaws, “Show me the way to go home. I’m tired and I want to go to bed. I had a little drink about an hour ago, and it went right to my head.”

When I was a little boy, after I was taught that I was separate, I was then taught that some things were mine, and some things were not. I began to learn the difference between being and having. Being used to be blissful and more than enough but now having became the thing. All the rage. (In both senses of that word.) I saw a toy in a store window and I had to have it. I learned the importance of the word mine.

If you want to torment a child (and why would you want to do that, really? Maybe just briefly to understand this idea).....point to something the child is holding, a stuffed animal maybe, and say the word “Mine!” Watch the alarm run through the child’s body as the child pulls the animal away and shouts back, “Mine!”

And so the fear begins. Security fades away. Nothing is secure anymore. Who can you trust? Your parents promise they will love you forever and then they divorce and one of them moves away! Even Santa Claus turns out to be unreal.

Can you blame a boy for wanting to get drunk? Fortunately, there’s a better way back home.

 

Take this monkey away from me

I knew I needed to quit drinking. I needed to get the monkey off my back. It was complicating my life and making it miserable.

It really was like having a live monkey on my back, all that day-in, day-out craving for the next drink. Most people couldn’t see me and my monkey but we were everywhere I went.

But they could see what the monkey was doing to me. The way I looked. The curiously large number of problems I had. The debts piling up. The lies and embarrassing behavior. Serious monkey.

Fast forward through thirty some years of sobriety and I’m sitting in a meeting. I’m listening to a young man talk about how he used the program to clear the resentments from his mind and give himself a chance at a whole new life. Even though he has no desire to drink or use drugs today, he comes to meetings, like I do, to learn how to live.

“The monkey’s off my back,” he said, “but the circus is still in town.”

Boy can I relate to that. All the things I used to think I had to drink over are still in town. Life was still a circus.

But slow me down.

So what?

Is it such a bad thing, this circus? I’m not a child any more. I’m not afraid of the clowns anymore. Because of spiritual progress (not perfection…not yet, anyway) I now see the circus (life on earth) as it was intended to be seen. Pure entertainment. The clowns (other people) weren’t sent here to scare me or make me angry.

They are here for my amusement. I never dreamed I could see life this way. Thank you L!

Each day I seek though prayer and meditation to maintain my appreciation for the greatest show on earth. To enjoy life. Enjoy, not just tolerate.

Not just cope. It’s not just that demoralizing goal of going into therapy to “learn coping skills.”

No, there’s laughter in these meetings.

I don’t go see my favorite comedian so I can cope with his jokes. Or so that I can accept him.

Those used to be the high bar for me. The best I could hope for: coping and acceptance. But now I see that the bar was actually low.

I mean, everybody’s laughing.

 

Addiction to distraction

There are other addictions. Mine was alcoholism, and it is a major destroyer of lives, but there are others.

There is even addiction to distraction, which sounds vague and mild, but it very well may be at the core of them all.

Porn addiction is very common these days. And while people say it isn't as serious as alcoholism ("You can die from alcoholism!") I sometimes question that.

We just saw (on CBS-TV Detroit) that a 58-year old man crashed his car and died while watching porn on his phone. Police reported that he had no pants on.

When this sad man was a boy, reading adventure books and watching his heroes in movies, did he dream of dying this way? Are his relatives at his funeral going to say that "he died as he lived..."?

The police report said he was partially ejected through the sun roof when his 1996 Toyota rolled on the freeway exit ramp. He was thrown from the vehicle. Pantless.

Some people are saying that these other forms of addiction don't merit the study that alcohol and drugs do.

But I think it's all about distraction. We keep choosing distraction from this life...especially when we think that this life is missing something.

“Driver inattention is the leading factor in most crashes and near-crashes,” the Michigan State Police website says.

Yes. Driver inattention. Lifelong inattention. But where could we better be giving our attention? What's the cure for this stuff?

"Just pay attention," my sponsor L would say to me as I tried to focus on what the people in the 12-Step meetings were saying. "Just listen, and when your focus wanders to thoughts of drinking, or thoughts about your life's problems, just gently bring your attention back to the room."

L said all I would have to do is not drink today, and keep an open mind about all the rest. Pay attention to those who have recovered and how they did it.

* * * *

I was hopeless and I thought I was helpless

When you enter a 12-step recovery program, it is recommended that you get a sponsor. That person should have at least a year of good sobriety, and preferably more.

My sponsor was a man named L. He passed away a few years ago. He died sober and happy. His life before sobriety was a catastrophic mess, filled with shame and depression. All kinds of embarrassing crises caused by his addiction to alcohol.

Which was a shame because he was a gifted classical pianist and a brilliant man.

But after he got sober, his life took a strange turn into a dimension he would never have realized were he not to work a program of spiritual recovery, a program that featured his amazing work sponsoring hopeless drunks like me.

Helpless. Hopeless.

I went to meetings and started thinking this is not for me. Aren't I smarter than these people? Am I not better educated? What is this silly religious stuff they are trying to get me to believe in? Am I not above all that?

And were it not for L, I may not .... no, I would not be alive today. Because L was smarter than I was. He was eloquent. He was well-read. He was a classical pianist. He knew what to do with my objections to the meetings. He cared about me and wanted me to have what he had...which at that time, some thirty years ago, was 10 years of his own sobriety. Plus happiness. His eyes sparkled and twinkled, and he laughed when I expressed my anguish. He just laughed.

He was always trying not to laugh. He insisted that he understood my pain, and identified with it.

"I was too good for this myself," L said. Then he would point to a framed slogan on the wall of our meeting hall that said, "Your best thinking got you here."

Here! In this room full of drunks drinking coffee and telling our near-death stories.

As I work now, thirty some years later, on my Death Wish project, at capturing the epiphanies and breakthroughs---the mental miracles that occurred for me then (and are available to everyone) I am lifted almost daily by people who are writing to me with their support......

Look at what a brave woman named Monaica sent:

Dear Steve,

I’m really grateful I found you.

You don’t have to know someone to touch their lives.

Because what we’re really talking about is “the kind of love that has no price tag…”

My sobriety date is June 10th, 2002.

I’m an AA baby. My parents have had a treatment center for over 30 years. My father has literally helped tens of thousands of people get sober.

I was raised around criminals, killers, and abusers who transformed their lives.

On Thanksgiving every year my home was filled with people who had nowhere else to go.

These are my people.

Thank you for your incredible commitment to giving it your all…to learning the truth about yourself so you could teach me about the lies that I tell myself…for teaching me to powerfully create instead of take.

Anything I can do to be of service to you as you create your legacy within the prisons would be an honor and a privilege.

May You Stay Forever Jedi…

Monaica Ledell
President, Truth Hacking

 

Is SOBER a good enough word for it?

For me, and so many of the people I know who have recovered from a serious addiction, the word sober isn't good enough. And the phrase “clean and sober” isn't nearly good enough.

Sober is a cold word. (For such a warm feeling.) People say things like, “That's a sobering thought.” They are referring to a head-clearing slap in the face or a cold bath, a plunge into the cold waters below the ice of reality. Sobering.

I mean, the word isn't completely wrong. It describes the base of it, the underlying clear mind. The refreshing purification of the human system that happens with spiritual progress.

But winning my freedom from addiction was better than just getting sober. Yes, it included sobriety. But that word is chilly and cold, and recovery is like the Jordan River. Like the old spiritual says, “It chills the body but not the soul.”

Freedom warms the soul.